149 – Lukas Abegg: Smart Contracts And The Law

Transcript

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industries go to 15db comm slash epicenter for discounts on registrations and exhibitor packages hello and welcome to episode 2 show which talks about the technologies projects and startups having a centralization and the global blockchain revolution today may her is at F Paul Sebastian is somewhere else so I'm all by myself but fortunately not quite by myself since Lucas avec joins me today he is a visiting researcher at Humboldt University here in Berlin and he's also a lawyer and doing his PhD in in law particular patent law and he's been doing a lot of research around 3d printing where his main thesis is on but

also sort of the intersection between 3d printing blockchain and and small contracts and and the kind of legal side of small contracts there was recently an interesting article by his on coin desk which of course will link to in the show notes and and yeah so thanks so much for joining us today Lucas thanks for having me so this seems to be a topic we keep coming back to and coming back to and coming back to I don't know how many episodes you've already done that have fully or partially focused on this idea and question you know small contracts and are they legal how do they interact with legal

contracts what are they legal implications it's certainly a big topic when did you become interested in that I started off as a lawyer in an IP law general IP law copyright trademark and licensing and more and more according to IT law meaning outsourcing contracts and software development contracts and stuff like that and that really got me interested in in this digital realm and I did am a master in IP law in Washington DC in 2009 and I

attended a copyright cyber copyright law class and there was one talk about 3d printing and ever since I'm thinking about 3d printing and how digital and analog world collide at some times and or intersect and depend on each other and and after year I decided to write a PhD and really get into that scientifically and so I came up with the topic of 3d printing and patent

infringement so I imagine in 2009 the massive scene like 3d printing what is that I mean that must have been it is extremely fringe technology is that right absolutely absolutely it was not very well known in the wider public I mean 3d printing or additive manufacturing as some like to call it is it's been around for some decades but it was always a very sort of niche for some prototype applications but with the elapse of some patents in early

noughties and with increased computer power so better software the additive manufacturing process got a wider public and so so it came along I guess is old in the early how do you call that 10 years it got just wider public intense mm yes yes it just became more it was not actually not new then it just became more publicly known and with having the experience of copyright being

disrupted by digital technology the lawyers were quite alert about new technology disrupting maybe other IP rights patent rights well in my case because the patent area is it's not really touched or disrupted by digital technology yet I mean there is some question about whether or not software should be patentable subject matter but that's that's pretty much it most

most of the patents are still taking mechanical devices or biotech devices that do not they're not interfered with by digital means and software and I think that might change with 3d printing can you explain that a little bit so what what what changes were 3d printing when it comes to patterned 3d printing sits very neatly into intersection between the analog of the digital world that's a because what you can do with what you can achieve with 3d printing is

for instance if you just imagine you have a physical object and analog object that is patented has a patent on it it's it's device and can hold something maybe and you can scan that device with a scanner I'll make a digital file of that file if you prepared for the 3d printer a 3d printer can print exactly the same device that you previously scanned so in essence that allows you to go back and

forth from the analog world into the digital world back to the analog world in any way in any direction you want it's not like with the copyright where we're copying is frictionless more or less or and free 3d printing is costly and and it takes time and and some effort but still you can change analog things with quite easy devices scanners are available for a four-channel public at low costs 3d printers also and it improve almost daily and you can make

your own copy of analog device and that calls for for some concerns I guess from IP law perspective so it seems to me the implications of that right if you can just scan a device and and then print it yourself and these printers will be everywhere I mean then doesn't that mean that copyright as it pertains to those kind of objects just is obsolete doesn't make sense anymore it's not gonna survive I have a bunch of questions makes it obsolete there are actually some lawyers who say yes yes it is

obsolete we we lose we lose control cop all IP laws copyright and patent laws to a certain extent are based on the concept concept that you have at least certain control over the copyrighted work like a book or the patented device like a machine and and by exercising that control you can exercise your right you can exercise your right to to not sell you a book or so and in the digital world you have no control over files I

mean maybe a little but basically you can send files in to anywhere in the world instantly at no cost no friction no quality loss and and that makes you lose the control over your device or over your work therefore one might think I think IP right has no point there's no point anymore because it just broke it doesn't work anymore let's get rid of it there are people think that way maybe I tried to stick to the IP law until we found something better and that

that hasn't happened yet okay interesting and and what are the big similarities between 3d printing and in blockchain how I came about thinking about blockchain and smart contracts is it also sits in in the intersection between digital and analog world I've read their various definitions of a smart contract I I once read one that says small smart contract makes sense if you can teach it to lies an analogue

asset and then put that on a blockchain and make commerce with it in some way and somebody trade it sell it etc and that kind of struck me that with l'occitane or technology people try to bridge this gap between digital and analog world so you studied 3d printing a lot and you know understand the issues in that area with if they're being dissimilarities to blockchain do you feel like you've learned something from looking at 3d printing that really makes you

understand boxing in a different way and you know makes you kind of see ok what these people are doing blockchain there are some big things that they're seeing in the wrong way and that they need to change your mind about are there things like that I guess so it's a little bit pretentious to say that I see big things that other people should see - what I found out about 3d printing is it is this notion of information definition of information how we understand information seems to me quite crucial what I found out in about 3d printing

and patent infringement is how how transformation from digital into analog and back how I start how to describe that how to how to capture that in words and I could do that because I found some definitions of information quite suitable to describe that process and for for 3d printing it would be 3 3

aspects of information that are important structural information seen syntactically information and semantic information structural information would be the form the shape of a thing syntactic information will be information between for instance between lectures or numbers or other variables and semantic information would be the content that we as a human us human give to words or to two things and and what how we think about and a certain device or certain piece item can have several

or one layer of aspect of this information for instance in a child as of course structural information you see the shape but that's also semantic information if I see a chair I know I can sit on it or if I write a letter and I see syntactic information that is different letters I see it's a long it's a long letter it's a lot of different variables on it and I can also read it and when I read it I get the semantic information maybe we can take a take down a little bit

further and make an example to understand how it works where with the smart contract the point where I saw this unity was when this whole heist happened we all remember that the Dow was was a smart contract put on the blockchain that got hacked and and someone used the code in a way that it was not intend intended to use are the creators of the Dow didn't intend to use and then I looked at uh uh so-so talks about what happened and how the Dow was

was created was it was pure code and idea was actually that everything in the code should be what there is there's no further legal framework there's no one interferes except was the curators but they had a very small role the curators and idea what everything work was everything should rule this Tao is in the language of the code and after the hack people said well that that's not

how how how it meant to go we had other intentions for that and then I realized that the semantic information the intent that wasn't in the code at all because if if it were it would have worked right but it wasn't so then I I realized that it is important to deal with notion of information very careful to be aware what what your accent were you're actually doing let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a multi coin wallet created by the people at the

central now in the past if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies it was a pain to handle them you either had to leave them on an exchange which was insecure or you had to have all these different wallets which was a hassle fortunately now with Jax knows medieval days of darkness misery and suffering are over Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added but it's not just storing cryptocurrency so you can do with Jax but you can also exchange them directly from whip inside the wallet thanks to their shape shift integration and since there's only one seed Jax makes it super easy to backup and sync to your other devices Jax works with Windows Mac OS

Linux Android iOS and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome so go to Jack say oh that's J a double X Co to download the wallet and get started today we'd like to thank Jax for the support of epicenter so the intent wasn't in the code that's certainly true do you think there would be potentially a way to do that or is that just generally the nature of computers that you know one programs them and one wants to do a certain thing but sometimes that doesn't work out that way into program and doing ends up doing something else isn't that just inevitable part of using computers and technology and code there

is a good question and actually it's a question that even philosophers are pondering about and I'm not sure if there is actually an answer there's a professor at MIT Noam Chomsky who is actually a linguist who thinks about these kinds of of questions this is is it possible to have a program that uses natural language that process language and thinking processes like human beings and he is he's of the opinion that's not that's

not possible or not not in the near future other like the proponents of the singularity say it will be it will be a day where it is entirely possible to have intent in a computer program and maybe your computer program may have even ability to harvest its own intent and there's a white widespread about what what could happen in the future one of the things that people use one of the arguments that people use when it

came to the style hack but also kind of adhere me general is this idea that you know code is law right so whatever is written in these small contracts that's written what's in these smart contracts you know if there's a bug and there's a bug right but that's that's really what counts I mean after all that's what was written in the Dow website as well I mean they brought some stuff about what it's supposed to do it didn't end up doing what it was supposed to do but then they also wrote in there you know if there's any discrepancy the there's no recourse right the code is what counts you sent me an interesting talk that I watched before by a guy named Lawrence Lessig who's a well-known legal

scholar and it was about this idea that code is law so he wrote this book with that title in a long time ago in 1999 can you talk about what was this idea of code is law backed and what is what does that term mean sure sure I think it code is law it was coined by Lawrence Lessig in this book 1999 and his idea was to look at how we are pushed and pulled in our actions why do we do certain things and he identified more or less four

factors controller guide our actions and these four factors would be the law market architecture and norms the law was in that mewed was statutory law criminal law you should not kill someone and the market was of course economic incentives if I make a buck I do something and norms are with normalcy he meant social norms if I do something peculiar maybe people look at me in a weird way

and I don't want to have that so I don't do it and architecture he meant that in a quite literal way like if there is a road you drive on the road if there's a fence you don't go over the fence you go around it and those factors are influence our behavior how we do stuff and what what he saw is with emergence the advent of the internet and more sophisticated software that architecture could also be code I think the example

is little older but he used this vending machine example there is a winning machine you put a quarter in it and you get a coke that's not does not really really really a cold code becomes part of architecture how we use software and software for example you can give a user a selection of possibilities and you can just choose from what's there you cannot choose anything else and that is also kind of architecture in the sense lesson meant

and so he saw that architecture architecture can be changed very easily by using code so he realized that that code becomes part of architecture I think it's a very interesting point in where it's also an interesting point notice if you have code back then or you know the structure of the Internet whether that's through hardware and routers and and stuff like that or through I guess things like web standards and all of those that they kind of shape behavior right that make sense but what's interesting know is that today if you think of it that way about

the structure of a website kind of steering your behavior in a certain way when companies are able to you know in real time kind of move the architecture around you to steer you behavior in a certain way right with maybe changing changing recommending different products giving one and offer like as one is on the website depending on where everyone moves Mouse and all things like that it's it it's interesting how that that power seems to have become bigger and bigger and bigger did you see that the same way absolutely absolutely it used to be the case that the law shaped the market law shaped norms law shaped

architecture and now it seems to be other way around it's not the government's that make a law and and enact a statute and and the architecture is building is built accordingly it's more the other way around architecture is built and then we had to find a law that tries to to capture what's happening if if it captures that at all so is that just because things are changing quicker and you know it's hard for law and regulation to keep up with that change

because you know the speed of that changing hasn't increased in the same amount or is there something else going on here that is crucial part I guess yes it's building software is very very easy and can be done quite quickly and enacting a bill is very cumbersome one take takes a lot of time that is the discretion discrepancy that certainly propelled that shift from from law to architecture and if there was you know if code was law back then and and they kind of I think it makes sense to sort of understand how that's the case in

terms that it created certain constraints moving behavior is there anything different about smart contract code is that law in a different way well what I've seen when I read articles or posts about smart contracts is that notion of code of code is law changed somewhat in in the direction that code is everything and that was certainly not what Lessing meant back in in 1999 in in his book I'm a living under impression that it is just used in a very

exaggerated way that people think we have even so much power that word software everything is possible and the code is law is all there ace and and it's all almost almighty and that is certainly not the case I'd say what I thought was very interesting about Lessig stalk is that he talked about this code is law in this descriptive way right he said okay that's just a factor that has to be taken into account when it comes to understanding what shapes human behavior but then he also made the

argument really more of a moral ethical argument that code that law should be shaping code and architecture and essentially I think if I understood his argument correctly it was that a law is in a way sort of at the top right and then law directly shapes behavior by saying for example murder is illegal you're gonna go to jail but also by having property law and things like that and those shape like the economic environment that creates the markets that pen shaped behavior and then to some extent shaping social norms although of course there's maybe a

discussion whether it's more social on shaping more than the other way around but to some extent loss can shape social norms I think the example Lessig made was smoking smoking bans that have certainly played a part in making this a stigmatized activity and then his point being like but you need the same kind of effect on architecture and and on code and if that's if that's kind of not possible anymore because code becomes bigger and bigger and laws aren't able to shape that area and influence that area it becomes this space where there is no influence of law which he seems to

view as a very negative thing do you share his view on this I do share his view on this in the sense that it creates a certain void that needs to be filled i I do agree with with with with a large picture of Lessig and what I also also think is that code cannot escape the law it's not something that is outside the law outside the world I mean we can we can go back to to the other end of the Internet and the Declaration of

Independence that Gary Barlow famously wrote one of the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation he said we are in the cyber I'm paraphrasing in the cyberspace and no one can can reach us here in the cyberspace and and as we have seen this is not true cyberspace and and law and law enforcement and people are very much intertwined still and for that's actually the reason why I think regulation and code should still interact and coach know at least where I am for now should not be completely

separate for from regulation and we should as developers of such technology we should embrace the legal world and try to shape architecture of code with with with the legal world let's take a break to talk about the ledger nano s the new flagship hardware wallet by Leger I'll let let your CEO and I clash avec tell you all about how simple the Nano s makes it to securely store all your private keys the legend of nano s is our latest generation hardware wallet this

is a multi currency Hardware wallet it has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen you can generate a new seed restore seed or set up your pin on the device your seed will never be exposed to the host computer on the nano wise you have different apps you are the Bitcoin app you have do a thorough map and you have the Fido u2f app for strong authentication and for instance with Google Dropbox or github you can manage your crypto currencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome App or the little wallet ECM chrome app with the Nano s all your Bitcoin and ECM addresses are derived from one unique seed with one

seed you can have in the same time Bitcoin is your easy on classic balances and also if you restore your seed you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as Fido u2f sssh GPG so it's very simple just one seed and multiple applications the Nano s sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability you can get yours today at ledger wallet comm and when you do be sure to use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your first order we'd like to thank ledger for their support of epicenter what I found striking about that that statement that you know cyberspace Declaration of

Independence and I only just watched a little bit of that that was shown as part of last six talk but maybe we'll also link to the whole thing this is a long time ago that this was done and it seems like there's this idea there this vision that you're gonna have this kind of libertarian and dream of a space of freedom where you know people can do what they want and there's no infringement and and there's no reach for the government for power and for those kind of Institute you know current institutions and and that if you look at it from today's perspective obviously didn't happen you know I think the

Snowden the Snowden cases illustrate that oh say that very well that that didn't happen at all and then if you look at it today we have a little bit of a similar thing again right where you have people in the crypto space right where a lot of people think that what blockchain is going to reach and I think in any theorem it's very prevalent right this idea that we're gonna have this space where people can run their application do their thing enter their small contracts etc and there's no there's no reach there's no ability for anybody or for the government to to eat

a few there and I wonder if that's gonna turn out the same again right there we're gonna look back and it was like I know that didn't happen at all it really didn't turn out that way I fear a little that it's gonna happen over again all over again same way it happened with the internet Declaration of Independence one reason why I think that's going to happen is from my perspective as a lawyer I've I think it's very interesting that people think is what for instances my contract should be the same as a contract I mean it

begins with smart contract very often let's say with smart contracts you can reach this independence when we look at what the smart contract is and compare that to a classic legal contract they might they may seem similar but actually there's a from a legal point of view there's a whole lot more to a legal contract than what you get with a smart contract for instance of your if I wanna make an example I have a legal contract with you I say I sell you X for the price of said that is not all there is

to that contract because if I don't sell you the item or the item is defective you can go to a court and you have rights according to a sales statute and all that that there is a court and to sell statutes that's not all that's all not in the contract you don't write that up in a contract right but it is still there and with smart contracts that's that's somehow lacking that's one reason why I think the the co cannot escape law or the the world and be completely independent can you say that the actual protocol

rules themselves take on a little bit that role so in in in you know the rules of how transactions get added what's valid who can it can absolutely take a little bit of the control in in particular I think it it can take control of the execution of a contract when we think about let's say financial derivatives that that's very common for a for a for a smart contract if it just have to I sell you some digital asset and that needs to be deducted from my book and added to your book etc that can

be done with with cold very easily and very successfully and that's really good good code can take that part of of a contract but what code cannot do is is touching something for instance that's what the court would do like cold cannot charge if if a certain item is defective or no or hardly for that you you still need a human to to look at it and here we come full circle with my idea about the information having several aspects of the effectiveness of an item for

instance he's really really hard to capture that in code if not impossible at all and as long as stats as that is not possible a code cannot escape the analog world and therefore cannot escape the law I think the point you making is a very interesting one from another perspective as well because if you make this contract today right we make a simple contract saying yeah I sell you certain thing and then there's all this back stuff to rely on right so first of all the we both have some understanding of contract so if we've signed various

contracts before I mean I'm sure you have a much better understanding but I still have some understanding for the contract is and then there are these existing you know police to go to lawyers to call on who understand me there's like common agreed norms around this even social norms but then of course there's also the court where one can enforce it and then one goes away and goes into the smart contract world and then there's nothing of that where there's all of that is basically gone and so if I wanted to make an employment contract using smart contracts in a way it almost would require you to recreate all of this stuff that all of a sudden you can't rely on anymore which seems

like an extremely hard task and which would kind of imply that you really shouldn't even try for any complex contract like like for example it's a an employment contract maybe at least for a for a while until you have you know there is some tools and experience and the norms around that absolutely absolutely and I would consider an employment contract as a rather simple contract and even that is difficult as you mentioned and but the thing is it is it is a really big task to incorporate the whole law into code and I'm I'm not

sure if that's even if that's even possible or even desirable I think there's two there's two things about that one will be you can just change the law make it more simple and and then yeah it's easier to capture contracting in in code for instance um don't don't mention things about material breach because nobody knows what the material breaches is just for simple contracts that have no element of judgment or no difficulties a

little bit like Bitcoin its Bitcoin in itself is not really not a smart contract but what they do is just adding and subtracting that's basically the simplest of all tasks I guess you can't get any less simple than having or not having and and and with that it works brilliantly it works absolutely brilliantly and you want to have the judgment element or other technology or another on the other way that's that's an interesting point and maybe that is part of the reason why bitcoin is the

one still you know the one blocking application that actually you know has some usage today's magic word is intentional that's int n TI o and head over to let's talk Bitcoin calm to sign in enter the magic word and claim you're part of the listeners reward another point that I find interesting here and that's less six I really I thought was quite striking in some ways and so if we if you think open our small contracts happening and we

have two space where people can really sort of directly enter contracts with each other doing there's no restrictions then what does that mean right so first of all of course it will mean less restrictions on what people can do right the same regulations that they don't have their effect any more you know to give an example if you're gonna have some sort of a you know I'm gonna sell my time for some money or something like that essentially employment thing right so children could you sell her labor nobody would know right there's no way to enforce that or you could have contracts or very very one-sided that might not be in for but if it's in smart contracts well you know like you cannot a theorem

blockchain is not gonna say this isn't fair like it is an interesting point no to what extent is that a good thing and to what extent is a bad thing I mean I think certainly the vast majority of people in the blockchain space and especially it's sort of traditionally in the blockchain space in Bitcoin space really beauties as a positive thing have you the decreased ability of governments to regulate as great thing as increasing freedom as really the whole point of this technology and then there is a question right with less six thing is like well but that's actually a negative thing and I'm not sure and probably somewhere in the middle I think it's

mostly a good thing that the government can't but then obviously it can also be a bad thing so it's a I think it's an interesting interesting point it will be interesting to see how this turns out it is absolutely a regulation is a sword that cuts the cuts both ways right we've we've made some experience with bad regulations everybody um somehow experienced that that some laws or some regulation interfere with your personal intentions or what you think your freedom should should be and so we

perceive regulation or something bad generally but we take sort of granted that regulation can be good as well sometimes we forget about that and what what what's important I guess is that we recall that a regulation can be a good thing and another aspect about regulation I would I would like to mention is that if you don't want to be regulated there's there's several ways you can go about it I mean why does a government regulate

something that was one reason would be because terrible things happens then government thinks now that shouldn't that should be happening i regulate that or a big player that does some lobbying about regulation so the first part there is a lot we can do about from a technology perspective if we try to make blockchain secure and come up with our own regulations in the sense of best practice for instance or what we've seen

recently is tools that approve your code of the others whole dau experience there's a great concern about security it's a greater concern about government how how to or the governance how to govern blockchain applications block chains in general how to run a blockchain and we if we take that in our own hands and try to not mess up things and not produce failures where people lose money or even worse than the

authorities and the government's or they are inclined to regulate less no that's that's an interesting point i mean it sees to me like today at this point they're not regulating primarily because they don't understand what's going on and things seem to be changing too quickly so they're like absolutely what to do absolutely and and that might not change so quickly right I mean with with Bitcoin of course they try to do some regulation I mean even if Bitcoin that didn't seem to get very far and Bitcoin of course is vastly simpler to understand and try to regulate then something like smoke

contrast which is very general concept that can be applied in all kinds of different ways and there is not even an agreed-upon definition of what a smart contract is to that question there's interesting that a lot of let's call big players like banks are involved in blockchain technology and I would assume that government's don't want to interfere too much with big banks because they're taxpayers and they have good lobbyists who look out for their clients we can maybe take a little bit

advantage of that and try to come up with best practices and and maybe even self regulation tools and use that that the fact that big players are interested in blockchain and and keep the government a little bit of our of our tests let's take a short break to talk about bit Finity the miami blocks in conference to be held this year from October 30th until November 2nd blockchain technology has been exiting the world of nerds and hackers and

entering the mainstream we're at the beginning of a big revolution that's gonna fundamentally change how the world works at the bit finiti conference we're gonna have the heavyweight speakers such as Don Tapscott who wrote the book the blockchain revolution or Joe Lubin of the startup consensus but we're also gonna have the industry panels that focus on real-world use cases and bring together both the tech expert we really understand blockchain and the kind of key decision-makers that will help blockchain become a real commercial success now you may just want to pack your bags and buy a ticket to Miami and that's certainly a good idea but if you're involved in a project or startup

there's something even better bit affinity will feature dozens of presentations by studying startups you can apply for the presenter package get an exhibitor stand and speak on the main stage to an audience of 500 to a thousand high level people including many VCS and top decision-makers and of course all that while sipping a martini in a luxury hotel in Miami Beach where Frank Sinatra once sang on stage to learn more how you can join startups at factum consensus ever ledger and stellar visit them at bit finis to the outcome slash epicenter and find out how you can get 10% off the company presenter package or your $200 discount code to attend we'd like to thank Definity for their support of that presenter so talk about a last topic here you mentioned I

think also in the article alternative dispute resolution my understanding is basically have a contract and there's some sort of clause in there if there's disagreement it goes to some sort of little special tribunal that's gonna give a decision as opposed to going through a regular court which presumably can be much faster and and maybe there's more certainty than with regular quote and stuff is that is that roughly an accurate description of what those are roughly saying yes it is it's called alternative dispute resolution and the alternative is is it's meant quite literally it is the alternative to the traditional court

system and what you can do is if you sign a contract for instance you can insert a clause that says if a dispute arises out of this contract I don't want to go I don't want to resort to a civil court or whatever court that would have jurisdiction over that contract I want to have a arbitration panel that judges happening judges that the contract and churches work what the part is performed or not performed I agree on a set of rules how we deal about and those rules

can can be defined pretty much freely there's there's not love cannot a lot of constraints to how those rules need to be shaped and maybe a good example to understand the concept is if you register a domain name with your local registrar you are subjected to the arbitration rules of that registrar that sets forth how you deal how it is dealt

with a domain name if it is infringing trademark for instance for instance that says that if there's a train from trademark infringing claimed about domain name it goes to a power list the panelists panelist touches the case if the panelist says there isn't any infringement I'll take back that domain name and delete it for instance that's that's something the registrar's came up with to deal with domain name hacking or squatting or whatever you call that and what I envisioned is tack

up that could be useful for smart contracts too if you have smart contract that says I sell you X and you pay me Y and then this whole transaction performs and you think X is defective then we need a panelist who who is arbiter about whether or not something is defective and and execute the judgment that we've been talking before and you can setup that in more or less simple rules and you can say what it is that is disputed you can

says you what parts of the contract should be subjected to what are not subjected to to those rules and you have you have a whole lot of freedom to decide that and I think that that would be a wonderful tool to explore and and to where to ask to smart contracts that's a very interesting point to particularly also because today right people if there's some sort of smart contracts being created and any if if there's a possibility that it would go to court one of the problems today would be that they would go in front of some

lawyers who wouldn't have a clue what on earth is going on and it would be very unpredictable like what kind of what would they would do with that with that kind of evidence or with what's going on in a small contract so if one could have some of these alternative dispute resolution cords that really are focused and specialized in small contracts and blockchain technology that really understand is then that could and that maybe can develop some kind of standards in terms of how do you handle disputes in this world than I but that does sound like a very interesting and intriguing approach I think so too yeah I think it won't be worthwhile to to have a closer

look if if the details play out the way that is this thought is started I've not written rules down or explored anything of that in greater detail but I think it took be possible details could be sorted out one of the beauty beautiful aspects of that would be that is that is actually legally binding if you have a judgment from such a Powell if you do it correctly and the rules are good enough

to to meet rule of law standard or whatever is mandatory for jurisdiction you're in then it is a it is a actual judgment that can be a force enforced by police if necessary and that would help to not get not become a digital Wild West and that would be an effort towards what I've mentioned before this regulation and self-regulation theme where you can put up your own regulations and so you

make sure that the government's don't interfere in a way that destroys the whole innovation at the whole the whole new technology and also what's what's interesting is there's there's lot of concepts technology-wise concepts around about how decisions should be taken for instance we've seen prediction markets a podcast about that a presenter TV there's other other efforts that have read about it's called back feet and

that's about value creation and and also reputation for instance if you wanna if you have to decide who should sit on a panel who should be panelists you can use technology and people who interact in a positive way in the environment of blockchain may get some reputation and you can use technology to create that reputation and harm that reputation and then you already have have a use of you you you can use that to define who who should be a panelist and that's a

wonderful playing field for those ideas and approaches I guess absolutely well thanks so much for coming on today Lucas now one last question what kind of research questions around blockchain and small contracts are you most interested in and are you planning to explore in the next year or a few years well first of all I have to finish my PhD there's still a lot of work to do but I think being a lawyer the idea of dispute resolution rules for small contracts that would be that would

be very interesting to go into more details if that's actually feasible if that if that's actually achievable how can how it could be intertwined with smart contracts and I would be happy to do more research in that direction excellent well thanks so much for coming on it was it was a pleasure talking to you another poet some of that research particularly also around around that concept because that's certainly an interesting one and and one that could be very very important and where I actually haven't seen a lot about this idea so that would be fantastic so

thanks so much for joining us today almost for Howell whoo yeah so with that we had our end episode is part of the LTP Network you can find this show and many others on my sofa calm and yeah so we put out the episodes every Monday you can subscribe to show both on YouTube on youtube.com slash episode of this point or you can download it and subscribe to it in any of the favorite podcast apps there are so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week